Project MUSE - Biography, Art, and Culture

In lieu of an abstract, hither is a brief excerpt of the depicted object: In her 1939 es ordinate, The nontextual matter of living, Virginia Woolf observed that post in our selves and in separate peoples selves is a late ripening of the human mind. Although we whitethorn take for tending(p) the biographical endeavour, Woolfs observations understood raise questions worth considering. By tattle us the consecutive facts, by go the little from the big, and pliant the whole so that we perceive the outline, Woolf concluded, the biographer does much to stimulate the image than any poet or novelist save the very(prenominal) greatest. In defining the whole, the tierce kit and boodle before us delineate separate lives by center non yet on separate selves precisely as well on the larger contexts that defined the possibilities, subject matters, and legacies of those item-by-items. As Woolf presciently pointed out, a record may serve a look long-familiar or whol eness pretermit. Is non any wiz who lived a feeling, and left a record of that smell, sacred of narration. she provoked. These three working strikingly face to tack onress Woolfs scrap: How to tell the account statement of a bread and butter? How to make it pregnant? To these questions we may add our own: Is that meaning intrinsic to the indivi triplex or socially and historically contextualized? What analytic tools can be used to show individuals and their work? ar there antithetic challenges to the biographical enterprise of the renowned and the little-known? What purport does biography serve, if non as stratagem then as hi fib? \nAlain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher. by Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, has a dual purpose. On the single hand, it seeks to tell the life story of Locke, a well-known but underappreciated and even neglected figure of dexterous life in the U.S. On the other hand, it aims to tell this story as one of philosophical c oherence. This is, as the title tells us, the biography of a philosopher, not a biography of the philosopher Alain Locke. The main intent is to interpret the life to reveal a consistent (although not necessarily seamless) article of faith system. Consequently, our understanding of Lockes accomplishments and legacy is enlarged and Lockes life in itself is meaningful. The three subjects of race, culture, and value are the organizing principles of Lockes intellectual life, Harris and Molesworth say at the outset.